The
English Father Christmas seems to have had an entirely separate origin
from Sinterklaas, being a personification of Christmas and a Yule-tide
visitor - not a gift-giver - rather than
a version of St Nicholas. The earliest reference to
him comes from the mid-fifteenth century, when a Sir
Christėmas appears in a carol, although most discussions
start with Ben Johnson's early seventeenth-century old or
Captaine Christmas. Whilst
strenuous efforts were made by the puritans of the seventeenth century
to do away with this character, they did not succeed. In the
nineteenth century Father Christmas benefitted from the general
Victorian revival of Christmas and can be found in, for example,
Dickens' Christmas Carol.
However, from the 1870s onwards Father Christmas became
increasingly like the American Santa Claus, both in terms of his
actions - he started giving gifts - and his appearance, with
the result that two are nowadays virtually inter-changeable.

Guide
to Online Resources

The
Oxford
Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford,
2001) entry on the English Father Christmas, quoted
below, considers him to be a pre-Reformation and medieval
Yule-tide visitor who is entirely separate from St Nicholas and
Sinterklaas, only being combined with him (and thus becoming associated
with giving presents to children) in the 1870s. There is also
some brief comment on Father Christmas in Ronald Hutton's The
Stations of the Sun, available as a limited preview via
Google Books.

Santa
Goes Green: Father Christmas & Santa - A brief piece
from the BBC on the separateness of Santa and Father Christmas, and the
origins of the latter. The
Green Man and Father Christmas offers more on possible pagan
influences from Heritage Lincolnshire, here
associating Father Christmas with fertility cults/Spirit of the
Wildwood (Father Christmas was usually associated with sprigs or crowns
of holly, ivy or mistletoe and green robes).

The earliest evidence for a
personified ‘Christmas’ is a carol attributed to Richard Smart, Rector
of Plymtree (Devon) from 1435 to 1477; it is a sung dialogue between
someone representing ‘Sir Christmas’ and a group who welcome him, in a
way suggestive of a visiting custom:

Nowell, Nowell, Nowell,
Nowell,
’Who is there that singeth so?’
’I am here, Sir Christėmas.’
’Welcome, my lord Christėmas,
Welcome to us all, both more and less
Come near, Nowell!’

Sir Christmas then gives
news of Christ’s birth, and urges his hearers to drink:

“Buvez bien par toute la
campagnie,
Make good cheer and be right merry.”

There were Yule ridings in
York (banned in 1572 for unruliness), where a man impersonating Yule
carried cakes and meat through the street. In Tudor and
Stuart times, ‘Lords of Misrule’ called ‘Captain Christmas’, ‘The
Christmas Lord’, or ‘Prince Christmas’ organized and presided
over the season’s feasting and entertainment in aristocratic
houses, colleges, and Inns of Court. A personified
‘Christmas’ appears in Ben Jonson’s court entertainment Christmas
his Masque (1616), together with his sons: Misrule, Carol,
Mince Pie, Gambol, Post-and-Pan, New Years Gift, Mumming, Wassail, and
Baby Cake. He protests against an attempt to exclude him:

Why, gentlemen, do you
know what you do? Ha! Would you keep me
out? Christmas, old Christmas, Christmas of London, and
Captain Christmas?... Why, I am no dangerous
person… I am Old Gregory Christmas still, and though I am
come from Pope’s Head Alley, as good a Protestant as any in
my parish.

The need to defend seasonal
revelry against Puritan accusations of Popery became more urgent some
decades later. Pamphleteers continued the device of
personifying Christmas, as in The Examination and Tryall of
Old Father Christmas (1658) and An Hue and Cry
after Christmas (1645). Echoing this tradition,
Father Christmas acts as a presenter in many versions of the mumming
play, with such opening lines as:

In comes I, old Father
Christmas,
Be I welcome or be I not?
I hope old Father Christmas
Will never be forgot.

The Victorian revival of
Christmas involved Father Christmas too, as the emblem of ‘good cheer’,
but at first his physical appearance was variable. He had
always been imagined as old and bearded (in a masque by Thomas Nabbes
(1638) he is ‘an old reverend gentleman in a furred gown and cap’), but
pictures in the London Illustrated News in the
1840s show him variously as a reveller in Elizabethan costume grasping
a tankard, a wild holly crowned giant pouring wine, or a lean figure
striding along carrying a wassail bowl and a log. One famous
image was John Leech’s illustration for Dickens’s Christmas
Carol (1843), where the gigantic Ghost of Christmas Present,
sitting among piled-up food and drink, wears exactly the kind of
fur-trimmed loose gown of the modern Father Christmas -- except that it
is green, matching his holly wreath.

Towards the end of the
1870s, he developed a new role as a present-bringer for children, in
imitation either of European St Nicholas customs, or of the American
Santa Claus, or both. By 1883, a French visitor mentions, as
a matter of common knowledge, that he comes down chimneys and puts toys
and sweets in stockings. In view of the German influence on
the British Christmas, it may be significant that in Southern Germany
the saint was accompanied by a gnome-like servant, usually dressed in a
red, brown, or green hooded garment, usually carrying a small fir tree
and a bag of toys. Father Christmas’s costume became more
standardized: it was almost always predominantly red, though Victorian
Christmas cards do occasionally show him in blue, green, or brown; in
outdoor scenes he often wore a heavy, hooded knee-length coat and fur
boots; he carried holly, but the holly crown became rarer.

Nowadays Father Christmas is
almost always associated with children’s presents rather than adult
feasting. His authentic dress is a loose, hooded red gown
edged with white; however, he now often wears a red belted jacket and
tasselled floppy cap imitated from Santa Claus, and has acquired
Santa’s reindeer sledge and nocturnal habits.

Elsewhere in this
work (p. 314) it is stated that Santa Claus and the tradition of his
gift-giving to children was first noted in England in 1879, and
nineteenth-century folklorists were at first very puzzled by it as they
knew of no similar English tradition, nor who Santa Claus was: see The
Historians and Santa Claus.